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Admittedly I skimmed most of your comment. I'm not masochistic enough to enjoy reading what an idiot I am or whatever else you wrote there, and I come to this s

by Xirdus 2mo ago

Admittedly I skimmed most of your comment. I'm not masochistic enough to enjoy reading what an idiot I am or whatever else you wrote there, and I come to this site for enjoyment. Let me know if I missed something important, like not understanding what you're saying at all yet again. I agree that intelligence is highly genetic. So is schizophrenia, though, and I don't think anyone would describe schizophrenia as a physical trait. So merely being genetic is not a proof of being a physical attribute. Just like intelligence and IQ are two separate things, so is intelligence and the underlying biological structures enabling intelligence. Saying the former when you mean the latter is not just unclear, it's flat out incorrect. There is as much proof of the 100 times intelligence gap as there's for any other number. Which, yes, is zero. Nobody has come up yet with any method to quantify intelligence directly, and until that happens, it'll be impossible to make any objective statement about raw amount of anybody's intelligence. I was just saying what I personally believe to be most likely. I was wrong about lack of correlation. Thank you for the links. That said, I did dig further, and from what I gathered, brain size differences account for at most 25% of variation in IQ. The other 75% must be either non-physical differences, or physical differences that don't affect brain size. My bet is on the former, because there's neither any evidence nor a theoreticsl model for the latter. Granted, I haven't looked for a theoretical model too deeply; you're more than welcome to prove me wrong yet again. The biggest obstacle for the ... whatever the thing you're saying is called, I'm 100% sure I'd get it wrong if I tried to name it, so I won't... are child geniuses. Children have smaller bodies, shorter legs, and less muscle mass than adults. There are extremely few 7 year old boys who are taller, faster or stronger than a median 25 year old man - around one in a billion for height, probably zero for the other two. Similar story with head circumference, though to a lesser degree. The 95% range for 7 year olds barely overlaps with the range for adults. Every single case I could find of a child that young reaching the mean HC of an adult man (57cm) was a sad story of a rare medical condition that definitely didn't make them smarter. I use it to conclude it's extremely rare for child heads - and by proxy, child brains - to reach the size of adults. If intelligence was physical, that should also prevent virtually all children from being more intelligence than a median adult. And yet, there's plenty of children whose intelligence surpasses most adults. It's almost commonplace. How do you reconcile that with your argument?

dahart 2mo ago
So why do you believe someone with 180 IQ is that much smarter than 100, if you agree there are no metrics to back it up? Surely there would be something that correlates with a two orders of magnitude increase in intelligence. Doesn’t the lack of such data suggest it’s actually not likely? Human head size reaches 80% by age two. IQ tests for 7 years olds are completely different tests and even different scales than IQ tests for adults. (See WPPSI vs WISC vs WAIS) The IQ scoring formula originally divided ‘mental age’ by chronological age to adjust (this is the Q in IQ), because it’s well known that a 10 year old knows more things and has a better memory than a 7 year old. Child geniuses are a much bigger problem for your argument than mine. If IQ measured the innate biological component of intelligence, then it’d be no surprise at all that you can find young outliers. But if intelligence is trained, then child geniuses would be meaningless. If intelligence is entirely trained, that means it’s entirely acquired during life, and so then everyone can become a “genius” with effort, and IQ would only be measuring motivation and not intelligence.
- Xirdus 2mo ago
  > So why do you believe someone with 180 IQ is that much smarter than 100, if you agree there are no metrics to back it up? Because that's how it works for most other learnable, trainable skills that aren't dependent on physical limits of the body, and I don't see why intelligence would be any different. Yes I'm still saying intelligence isn't physical. I know IQ is (used to be?) age-adjusted. I wasn't talking about IQ there, I'm talling about raw intelligence. Child prodigies beat adults at chess, at maths, at programming, you name it - and it's happening way more commonly than head/brain size variation would allow for it. I never said entirely trained. For somebody who just spent 10 whole paragrahs across 3 comments (+/- 50%, like I said I wasn't really reading) chastising me for not reading carefully, you sure fumbled this one. Think of intelligence like playing piano. Most people can't play piano. But most people can learn to play piano, to some extent. How good they are depends mostly on how much they've been learning, but everyone has some point they just can't push past through no matter how much they try. Usually that point is pretty low, way before the general audience is willing to pay for watching. For a tiny minority, that ceiling is much higher and the growth they get from practice is much faster too - we call these people talented or naturally gifted. And then there are the piano prodigies who absolutely shred the keyboard at the age of 5. There are enough of them that you can't explain it away with abnormal growth of any relevant body organ. That's what I mean when I say head circumference variation is too small in children to explain the number of child geniuses, if intelligence is entirely biological. IQ measures whatever intelligence happens to be. It's just an assumption that the kind of intelligence that helps with IQ tests is entirely biological, and only under that assumption IQ measures the biological component only. But that assumption is likely wrong, considering you can train to score better at IQ tests (it's a fact). Either intelligence isn't biological, or IQ metric sucks at isolating the biological component - feel free to assume the latter.

by Xirdus 2mo ago

dahart 2mo ago

So why do you believe someone with 180 IQ is that much smarter than 100, if you agree there are no metrics to back it up? Surely there would be something that correlates with a two orders of magnitude increase in intelligence. Doesn’t the lack of such data suggest it’s actually not likely? Human head size reaches 80% by age two. IQ tests for 7 years olds are completely different tests and even different scales than IQ tests for adults. (See WPPSI vs WISC vs WAIS) The IQ scoring formula originally divided ‘mental age’ by chronological age to adjust (this is the Q in IQ), because it’s well known that a 10 year old knows more things and has a better memory than a 7 year old. Child geniuses are a much bigger problem for your argument than mine. If IQ measured the innate biological component of intelligence, then it’d be no surprise at all that you can find young outliers. But if intelligence is trained, then child geniuses would be meaningless. If intelligence is entirely trained, that means it’s entirely acquired during life, and so then everyone can become a “genius” with effort, and IQ would only be measuring motivation and not intelligence.

Xirdus 2mo ago
> So why do you believe someone with 180 IQ is that much smarter than 100, if you agree there are no metrics to back it up? Because that's how it works for most other learnable, trainable skills that aren't dependent on physical limits of the body, and I don't see why intelligence would be any different. Yes I'm still saying intelligence isn't physical. I know IQ is (used to be?) age-adjusted. I wasn't talking about IQ there, I'm talling about raw intelligence. Child prodigies beat adults at chess, at maths, at programming, you name it - and it's happening way more commonly than head/brain size variation would allow for it. I never said entirely trained. For somebody who just spent 10 whole paragrahs across 3 comments (+/- 50%, like I said I wasn't really reading) chastising me for not reading carefully, you sure fumbled this one. Think of intelligence like playing piano. Most people can't play piano. But most people can learn to play piano, to some extent. How good they are depends mostly on how much they've been learning, but everyone has some point they just can't push past through no matter how much they try. Usually that point is pretty low, way before the general audience is willing to pay for watching. For a tiny minority, that ceiling is much higher and the growth they get from practice is much faster too - we call these people talented or naturally gifted. And then there are the piano prodigies who absolutely shred the keyboard at the age of 5. There are enough of them that you can't explain it away with abnormal growth of any relevant body organ. That's what I mean when I say head circumference variation is too small in children to explain the number of child geniuses, if intelligence is entirely biological. IQ measures whatever intelligence happens to be. It's just an assumption that the kind of intelligence that helps with IQ tests is entirely biological, and only under that assumption IQ measures the biological component only. But that assumption is likely wrong, considering you can train to score better at IQ tests (it's a fact). Either intelligence isn't biological, or IQ metric sucks at isolating the biological component - feel free to assume the latter.